‘Provocative and brave’: queer perspectives shine in the latest art jewellery exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design

Ron Porter and Joe Price first encountered contemporary art jewellery on a visit to New York’s American Craft Museum, now the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), in 1986. The nontraditional materials and expressive craftsmanship of studio jewellery, which arose in the United States in the 1940s, resonated with the couple, who have long appreciated the power of art to surface unconventional narratives. Since then Porter and Price have acquired an extensive collection of art jewellery, which they recently donated to the institution that first sparked their love of the artform.

‘I was just in love,’ says MAD’s senior curator Barbara Paris Gifford of her visit to see the art jewellery collection of Porter and Price. In the lead-up to the acquisition, she spent three days with the couple in their South Carolina home, exploring their extensive array of ‘provocative’ and ‘brave’ studio jewellery, with an emphasis on works by makers whose wearable art encompasses important social issues of the day and speaks to what the collectors call their ‘gay sensibility’.

OUT of the Jewelry Box, a new exhibition now on view at MAD, puts freshly acquired works from the collection of Porter and Price in conversation with additional pieces from MAD’s impressive studio jewellery holdings to trace a vibrant history of the medium through a wide range of artists from the 1950s to the present. Curated by Gifford, the show is one of the first museum exhibitions to spotlight queer perspectives in studio and contemporary art jewellery.

Gifford notes that most collections of art jewellery held in museums come from heteronormative women, and as gay men Porter and Price offered an exciting alternative perspective around which to build a show. Their collection contained many mainstays of the category, such as Gijs Bakker, Sharon Church, and Kim Overstreet and Robin Kranitzky, ‘but what they’re collecting from those artists was very different and unusual,’ she tells Christie’s, pointing, for example, to Bakker and Pauline Barendse’s Donatello with Ball Brooch (1998) featuring a Christ-like soccer player with an exposed torso.

Both Porter and Price grew up in the American South and draw inspiration from the region’s rich narrative tradition. ‘It is not surprising, then, that we would embrace art that tells us a story,’ Porter says in an interview in the exhibition’s catalogue. For the collectors, those stories include identity narratives as well as political and societal concerns.

‘They’re advocates for this category and for artists who are brave enough to put these kinds of messages out in the world,’ says Gifford. Their collection highlights pieces by artists like Elizabeth Chenoweth Palmer, Jan Yager, and Joyce Scott, who imbue their wearable sculpture with activist statements on topics ranging from abuse to drug addiction.

The couple are longtime collectors of jewellery designed by Keith Lewis, who was a member of ACT UP and made works that responded to the AIDS epidemic. His Dead Souls Neckpiece (1992) — executed in electroformed copper, sterling silver, gold plate and liver of sulfur patina — is anchored by a silver bead in the shape of the human immunodeficiency virus surrounded delicate bird-like heads that descend in size. For Lewis, the visual fading away of these figures suggests the loss of many members of the community to AIDS.

Complementing the experimental and activist brooches, necklaces and bracelets gifted by Porter and Price are selections from MAD’s permanent collection by queer artists. From modernist pioneers of the 1950s like Art Smith and Noma Copley to staples of the 1960s and ’70s like David Webb to contemporary makers including SULO BEE and Ken Williams Jr., the display draws connections between the lived experiences of the artists and their works’ playful and unconventional forms. These include two ‘gorgeous’ newly conserved necklaces by Smith, notes Gifford. The pieces are typical of Smith’s sinuous brass forms, which were worn by luminaries like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne.

One of the defining characteristics of art jewellery is the inclusion of nontraditional and nonprecious materials. The artists in the OUT of the Jewelry Box employ many found objects and other unexpected media in pieces that push the bounds of what is wearable. ‘Incorporating material culture brings in a host of associations and creates this narrative,’ says Gifford. ‘Working in traditional jewellery materials like silver, gold, platinum and stones doesn’t have the same level of specificity as, say, bird toys [as in Teresa F. Faris and Charmin’s Collaboration with a Bird V, #10 (2017)] or beefcake photographs [as in Andrew Kuebeck’s brooches].’

An accompanying audio guide to the exhibition immerses visitors in the voices of the collectors, artists and relevant experts. ‘It was really important for me not to be interpreting the work myself,’ says the curator. ‘I want people to hear the voices and to understand the perspectives of the collectors and the artists. There’s something very intimate about listening to these stories, many of which are identity stories. The hope is to create dialogue and understanding.’

As one of the artists in the show, the contemporary gender-nonconforming artist Rebekah Frank, puts it, ‘Art jewelry operates as a vehicle, a badge, an emblem, bringing the wearer into a conspiratorial role as they continue the artist’s questioning of complex issues like desire, belonging, ambiguity, and self-acceptance.’ OUT of the Jewelry Box centres jewellers who, like collectors Porter and Price, are radically and defiantly themselves and who make a statement through wearable art.